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/**
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 * Copyright © 2018 Alex Yst <mailto:copyright@y.st>
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$xhtml = array(
	'<{title}>' => 'Missionaries',
	'takedown' => '2017-11-01',
	'<{body}>' => <<<END
<img src="/img/CC_BY-SA_4.0/y.st./weblog/2018/07/26.jpg" alt="Some sort of event at the park" class="framed-centred-image" width="649" height="480"/>
<section id="religion">
	<h2>Religion</h2>
	<p>
		Two days ago, I was running late when I left for work.
		A missionary caught me before I could get dressed, but I had no time to deal with them at the moment.
		They asked for my telephone number, which of course I don&apos;t have, and I offered them my email address instead.
		If you&apos;ve read past entries in my journal, you may know I have a history of hearing out missionaries, despite being a non-believer.
		I didn&apos;t get home that day until late, but yesterday, we set a date for them to come back today.
	</p>
	<p>
		Apparently, this missionary never gets responses when people give them an email address instead of a telephone number.
		They didn&apos;t think I&apos;d respond to their letter.
		Hopefully I&apos;ve changed their opinion of email users a bit though.
		For me, email is a semi-intimate way to reach me, similar to how most people probably view telephone calls.
		I guess many people give out email addresses as a way to blow you off, but I don&apos;t do that.
		If I give you my email address, I mean business.
		Anyway, they followed through and emailed me and it paid off, so hopefully they&apos;ll continue to not just throw out email addresses given them.
		Hopefully they&apos;ll at least try, as they did two days ago.
	</p>
	<p>
		Anyway, I expected the usual stuff, where they were to spout off religious morals from the bible without any basis.
		Instead, we had a history lesson.
		They showed me knowledge from the bible that wasn&apos;t widely known yet.
		Specifically, the earth not being held up by anything (such as a turtle, or whatever) and basics about the water cycle.
		They showed me prophecies that came to pass.
		They were actually pretty convincing that a knowledgable being had to have written this book.
		I&apos;ll need to think on this more, but I might actually start believing in a god.
	</p>
	<p>
		Or two.
		It seems this branch of Christianity believes in two gods, a father and a mother.
		The father, originally Yahweh or Jehovah, came to earth and was reborn as Jesus.
		That makes Jesus not the son of a god, but a god himself.
		As for the mother, it seems her name is Jerusalem.
		I guess she had an earth city named after her, the city isn&apos;t the only one that holds that name.
	</p>
	<p>
		There&apos;s one issue that weighs on me though, if all this is true.
		These gods intend to rule over us.
		If we don&apos;t bend to their ways, we&apos;ll be erased.
		Or sent to hell.
		Or something.
		That doesn&apos;t make what they desire right, just, or correct.
		It only means we need to follow them anyway if we are to be &quot;saved&quot;.
		But can a life of subjugation really be called &quot;salvation&quot;?
		And of course, I made sure to verify with them that their church views homosexuality as a sin.
		Apparently, even though it hurts no one, it&apos;s considered one of the most severe crimes against the gods.
		I tried to get an explanation as to why, or at least a confirmation as to that there is no explanation, but I got neither.
		Supposedly the answer is available to us, but the missionary (who came with a silent parter) wouldn&apos;t tell me what it was.
	</p>
	<p>
		Also, where did these deities even come from?
		Did two random, omnipotent forces just emerge from nothing?
		How does that even work?
	</p>
	<p>
		On the way home after the meeting, my thoughts drifted toward religion again.
		Honestly, I&apos;ve been given a lot to process, and no matter whether I decide this variant of Christianity is believable in the end or not, I&apos;m going to be thinking about this on and off for quite some time.
		One thing that the missionary mentioned was that earth is a prison, a place souls were put because we&apos;d sinned in heaven.
		That&apos;s why this world is so terrible.
		First, because it&apos;s a prison.
		It&apos;s meant to be terrible.
		Second, because every last person here, without exception, is a criminal.
		We&apos;re all terrible.
		But, he said no crime we commit here on earth could possibly be even close to as bad as the crime we committed to be sent here.
		Supposedly, we were all supposed to be destroyed for our crime.
		Instead, we were sent here to sort out who had sinned intentionally and who had unknowingly sinned.
		Yahweh, or Jesus now, I guess, knew all along who deserved destruction and who deserved a second chance (through his omniscience), but some heaven-dwellers didn&apos;t sin and are in heaven still.
		If Jesus had selectively punished the truly guilty, the other heaven-dwellers would be unable to see why.
		They&apos;d think Jesus was being selective with no just reasoning.
		So we were put here, on this planet and on display for all of heaven, to show what kind of people we are.
		Those that are good people will be saved.
		Those who are not will not be.
	</p>
	<p>
		It dawned on me as I biked home that this means the trillions of people here who have ever lived or will ever live had all committed some heinous crime.
		I mean, yes, everyone here is terrible in their own way, but what could we <strong>*all*</strong> have done that warranted our utter destruction?
		But then I remembered.
		The missionary had already told me.
		Supposedly, we&apos;d grown arrogant and thought ourself like gods ourself.
		In other words, we didn&apos;t know our place.
		Not knowing our place is somehow worse than murder.
		It&apos;s certainly a crime I&apos;d commit too.
		I&apos;ve fantasised on multiple occasions that there was a god, and I&apos;d managed to become powerful enough to slip out of his clutches.
		I&apos;d separated myself from his power so he could never hurt me.
		I never acted against him in these fantasies, but I&apos;d certainly tried to preserve myself absolutely instead of submitting to his whims, not knowing each day whether I&apos;d still exist the next.
		I mean, the god of the bible has shown his cruelty on many occasions throughout the book.
	</p>
	<p>
		Then I had another flash of realisation.
		In this light, much of Christianity&apos;s bizarre quirks make perfect sense.
		I mean, there&apos;s this all-powerful entity.
		Why does he need our praise and warship?
		We were created to be his underlings, but surely he doesn&apos;t need us.
		Why does he need his ego stroked?
		Why is it those that accept him as their lord and saviour that supposedly get saved, while even the most kind-hearted non-believer doesn&apos;t get that salvation?
		But that&apos;s just the thing.
		We&apos;re here because we didn&apos;t submit to him.
		We though ourselves as good as him, or perhaps better.
		The whole point is to prove we&apos;ll submit to him.
		Anything less and anything different isn&apos;t what he&apos;s looking for.
		Anything else means we are choosing to commit the crime of not accepting our place.
	</p>
	<p>
		Is it just?
		Hell, no.
		No one&apos;s existence should hinge on submission to another.
		But according to the Christian religion, that&apos;s  exactly what we were created to do.
		If we fail in our purpose of being subservient to Jesus and Jerusalem, we are to be discarded as defective.
		Assuming this religion is correct, that&apos;s what we are to our creators: expendable.
		And that hurts.
		I&apos;m not sure I believe, and it still hurts.
		It hurts worse than believing there is no afterlife at all and accepting the fate of oblivion as a given.
		Yes, he is trying to save those that will submit, so we&apos;re not quite as low as trash, but in the end, we&apos;re discardable if we don&apos;t measure up to his standards.
		I think before I further consider whether or not I believe, I need to do some thinking about which option is the worst: oblivion, eternal torture, or subservience to someone that thinks you expendable.
		If subservience is the worst option, it doesn&apos;t even matter what&apos;s real and not.
		Continuing on how I am is the best course of action.
		If hell or erasure are worst, I need to compare them against subservience further to determine an exact ranking and decide how much worse each is than the one before.
		I mean, it&apos;s not like we could choose whether hell or erasure in the one we get.
	</p>
</section>
<section id="Minetest">
	<h2>Minetest</h2>
	<p>
		I inverted my 8-bit palette, then bumped up the brightness, effectively reversing the order of the pixels without actually redoing the palette pixel by pixel.
		It was a real time-saver.
		I also dismantled the palette and put it into a more workable form, so I could work on rearranging the pixels to account for Minetest&apos;s <code>inherit_color</code> feature.
		My planned 5-bit palette doesn&apos;t fit as nicely into my 8-bit colour palette as I&apos;d like it to.
		After staring at my 8-bit palette long enough, I formed a new plan.
		Nothing anywhere near a neutral grey is present.
		Basically, each colour beyond the basic eight colours has two of its colour channels tuned up or down, more toward grey, while one colour channel remains at either full strength or near zero.
		Less extreme colours are therefore available, so players need not stick with the eight basics, but nodes will still be very much colourful.
	</p>
</section>
<section id="drudgery">
	<h2>Drudgery</h2>
	<p>
		My discussion post for the day:
	</p>
	<blockquote>
		<ol start="0">
			<li>
				It&apos;s true that censorship is wrong, based on intuitive knowledge.
			</li>
			<li>
				It&apos;s true that Debian is a clean system free of harmful proprietary components, based on authoritative knowledge. It&apos;s worth noting that this is technically provable, but I don&apos;t have the time or skills to prove it. I accept it as true because I trust the sources I hear it from.
			</li>
			<li>
				It&apos;s true that ideas are not property and cannot be owned or &quot;stolen&quot;, based on logical knowledge.
			</li>
			<li>
				It&apos;s true that short domain names (one letter dot two letters) can be purchased on a small budget if you&apos;re willing to put in the effort to track such available names down, based on empirical knowledge.
			</li>
		</ol>
		<p>
			(Before you complain about the second section being missing from this post, reread the instructions.
			They specifically say to write a <strong>*second*</strong> main post later in the week, preferably after having gotten responses to the first post.
			So, I&apos;ll post the second half later in the week, after having gotten responses to this post.)
		</p>
	</blockquote>
</section>
END
);
